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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Y. Ichmasa et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 775-778
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Biology, Health, and Radiation | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1035
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Heavy water (D2O) vapor release experiments were carried out in a greenhouse using deuterium as a substitute for tritium and uptake and loss kinetics of D2O in leaf of a tangerine tree and formation, translocation and retention of organically bound deuterium (OBD) in tangerine exposed to D2O under different growth stage were investigated. Rate constants of D2O uptake in leaves of tangerine were 0.2-1.11 hr-1 in the daytime release and 0.03-0.12 hr-1 in the nighttime release. Rate constants of D2O loss in leaf after daytime release were almost the same as those after the nighttime release. No significant differences in the half time of D2O loss were observed between daytime and nighttime releases, but those in winter experiments were about 6 times higher than those in summer ones. The retention of OBD of the edible part of tangerine at harvest was very low and OBD was 0.08% or 0.07% on average of D2O in air moisture in daytime or nighttime releases.
